Rosemary rang last week shouting, "Switch the telly on." It was a grisly exposé of goings on in the geriatric ward of the Royal Sussex Hospital, Brighton. Memories of hell. Eleven years ago my father died there on a trolley next to the scan machine, which he had finally reached after months of delay. Too late.

Now here is the really grim news. When my parents lived in Hove we used to beg that they be sent to the Royal Sussex. Why? Because the alternative, Brighton General, was even worse. We called it Death Row. Few elderly people, of our acquaintance, came out alive. One day I visited my father there. He was wandering the ward, muddled and covered in shit. His sister, coincidentally, was in the next ward, her bed sodden with wee. With the ward stinking of excrement, in came the lunches. No one helped the half-dead patients to eat them. What century were we in? Soon my father died, sent at last from this miserable pit to his final trolley.

This all explains why I brought my mother here, because she too was sent to Death Row. One parent dead on a trolley is enough for anyone. Curses, curses, that I didn't manage to rescue my poor Daddy as well. But on a cheerier note, I recently heard that in his youth, my father, his brother and my grandpa dressed up as gangsters - Al Capone-style, hats and handkerchiefs across the face - ran into the grumpy brother-in-law's shop and stole the till. Auntie screamed behind the counter, customers fainted, but they dragged the till away, ran off with it and hid round a corner, laughing.

What an amusing fellow my father was, and stunningly handsome, even when old and poorly. Charmed nurses would cluster voluntarily around his bed, but the nurses in Death Row had no time to cluster. I don't like to keep banging on about the dying elderly, but I notice that they are at last in the news - two programmes on horrid ways of pegging out in one week. Perhaps because the baby-boomers have noticed that the Reaper has his eye on us, and we refuse to fade out painfully and nastily in dump hospitals. I never say my prayers, because I have no faith, but now, I find myself on autopilot, mumbling, "Please God, send the Panorama team undercover into Brighton General. At once."